Fascenda, Published U.S. Patent Application Nos. US 2009169013, US 2009172412, US2009268902, assigned to KOOLSPAN, INC. (Hereinafter referred to as the KOOLSPAN patent applications) and incorporated herein by reference, disclose a system for and method of providing end-to-end encrypted real-time phone calls using a commodity mobile phone and without requiring service provider cooperation. The system and method improve upon prior art techniques by omitting any requirement for mobile phones that are specially manufactured to include end-to-end encryption functionality.
The KOOLSPAN patent applications generally relate to a system for and method of secure telephony. More particularly, they relate to a system for and method of receiving and making encrypted phone calls to and from, respectively, a mobile phone. In the KOOLSPAN Applications, key tables may be stored in one or both of the commodity mobile phone and the integrated circuit with which the commodity mobile phone is provisioned. The key tables may be delivered to or generated by the mobile phone, or may be present on the integrated circuit when the integrated circuit is acquired. For delivered key tables, managed providers or enterprises may monitor and track the delivery of the key tables.
The initial authentication step, includes the commodity mobile phone transmitting to the destination phone a list of IDs for key tables that the commodity mobile phone has access to. Upon receiving the list of key table IDs, the destination phone selects from the list an ID of a key table to which the destination phone also has access. At this point, the commodity mobile phone and the destination phone both have possession of at least one session key as a result of the authentication process. The phones then use the session key(s), either directly or as a basis for other keys, to encrypt and decrypt voice communications sent and received over the selected communications channel (e.g., CSD, voice, etc.). The actual encryption and decryption operations may be performed by a dedicated cryptographic processor present in the integrated circuit that the commodity mobile phone is provisioned with, by software executing on the phone, or by using other techniques. For GSM phones and in certain embodiments, all data existing between the respective phones' Adaptive Multi-Rate (“AMR”) codecs may be encrypted using the session key(s), thereby providing for end-to-end encrypted phone calls.
The technique disclosed in the KOOLSPAN patents encrypts data in a regular GSM type cellular telephone call. While this may work for some types of cellular telephones, it may not be workable for other devices, including cellular devices that are combined with Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and/or other communications type devices (text messaging, internet access, or the like).
It's estimated that more than 12 million BlackBerry devices are currently in use in government and commercial environments. While these tools greatly enhance productivity and convenience, they can also expose organizations to serious risks if not properly secured. Though secure phone solutions exist, they have traditionally been expensive, difficult to acquire and cumbersome to maintain and operate. Many are also easily distinguishable as secure phones, which compromises operational security and exposes their users.
However, to date, an effective technique for applying the technology of the KOOLSPAN patent applications to the Blackberry mobile device has not been implemented. Thus, it remains a requirement in the art to provide a technique for providing voice encryption for use with a Blackberry type PDA/cellular device.
VoIP solutions are known in the art for use with computer systems, including laptops and PCs and the like. Vonage, Skype and other systems allow users to send and receive phone calls using personal computers such as laptops or desktop PCs. Skype has implemented VoIP type communications for cell phones, but does not provide voice encryption for such applications.